A bass synth pedal with no tracking delay.

The Markbass Super Synth bass pedal offers seriously cool stereo sounds with no tracking delay. Set the sensitivity level to match how hard or soft you play, and the pedal tracks your playing perfectly. The smooth, deep sounds include a very wide variety of synth tones, all sensitive to the intensity of your attack. Octaver mode allows you to layer your sound with octave up, octave down and two octaves down. You can either use the synth output only, or mix in your dry bass sound. Preset parameters can be modified using the supplied software, and downloaded back to the pedal from your computer via the USB connection.

For its compact size and moderate price, this is a great monophonic bass synth pedal, and one of the better sounding octave dividers, with true bypass. It offers 3 oscillators each tunable up and down a 2 1/2 octave range from center (covering 5 octaves!), with fine detune, level and pan on each, giving a pretty huge, fat sound. There are 9 onboard patch locations for the synth section. The 9th location is the only one that allows you to directly access the oscillators through the software editor, but the first 8 can be thought of as templates for easy modification if you like having a sample starting point to create your own patches, directly on the pedal with more limited function access, or with the editor for full function access--recommended! With the editor, you can create every patch from scratch, and store them on the pedal, including in the first eight factory preset locations. While being able to control the ADRS envelope is a very nice touch, the fact that you can't completely eliminate your dry bass signal from outputting reduces the effectiveness of the attack portion if you want a completely smooth swell. A minor flaw--you can weight the output strongly to the synth sound--but some points taken off. The portamento suffers a bit for similar reasons, although if you play a note and slide up a single string, it works very well. You can get a pretty convincing ELP "Lucky Man" if you're going for that. it does a good job on other classics like "Chameleon" and "Birdland" too. You can't control the cutoff, resonance, or ADSR of each oscillator individually, only as a group of all three--that would have made this great pedal totally amazing and probably a lot more expensive.

I think the octave divider section, 3 patch locations on the pedal, makes use of one of the synth oscillators, but I'm only making that judgement by its sound, it's not in the documentation. The octave and synth sections track similarly well, even for fast passages if you play cleanly. There are the typical lower pitch limits you find with most octave dividers. If you use two octaves below, or use the lower octaves in the synth patches, it loses definition somewhere around the 5th fret A on your E string, but if you minimize the suboctaves on the synth patches, it tracks down to an open low B on a 5 string. There's also an upper limit on my 6 and 7 string basses, between the 10th and 14th fret on the C string depending on the patch.

The included documentation is sparce, but you don't need much. It's a pretty straightforward pedal, especially with the software editor. An important point, the editor is the same for all their pedals, but you have to click the software tab that's for the Supersynth. The program will not automatically detect which pedal it's connected to, and that may make you think the editor isn't working. Markbass customer service is excellent, and I've always gotten useful responses via email within 24 hours.

While this isn't a "do everything" synth pedal, not a MIDI or GK-driven unit, it's great at what it does, mainly recreations of various analog bass synths with the flexibility to create your own versions within that realm. For that, I give it a high recommendation. I own, or have owned, the Boss SY-3, Boss GT-6B, Digitech SynWah, EHX Bass Microsynth, Line 6 Bass POD XT Live, and Behringer Bass V-Amp. For synth sounds this one is at the top of the list.

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